Dave McMenaminNov 6, 2025, 07:00 AM ETCloseLakers and NBA reporter for ESPN. Covered the Lakers and NBA for ESPNLosAngeles.com from 2009-14, the Cavaliers from 2014-18 for ESPN.com and the NBA for NBA.com from 2005-09.Follow on X
Los Angeles Lakers vs. Portland Trail Blazers: Game Highlights (1:14)Los Angeles Lakers vs. Portland Trail Blazers: Game Highlights (1:14)
WHEN LINDSEY HARDING saw Stockton Kings assistant general manager Gabriel Harris approaching the practice court on Dec. 15, 2023, she figured he was the bearer of good news.
When Harris signaled for the 6-foot-10 Chance Comanche, Harding’s mind immediately darted to the center’s recent performance in the G League’s Tip-Off Tournament — 14.2 points on 62.8% shooting and 7.0 rebounds per game — as Comanche’s ticket to the top.
With Harris there to deliver the news, Harding’s instinct was to get Comanche off the floor immediately, to protect him from turning an ankle and spoiling the opportunity that awaited.
“My mind goes to: Did he get a DUI or hit-and-run or something? And they told me that he was arrested for kidnapping,” she told ESPN. “I was shocked because, ‘Not [Chance]. This is a joke, right?'”
Four days later, Comanche faced an extradition hearing in Sacramento Superior Court and was shuttled to Las Vegas.
There he was charged with murder, kidnapping and conspiracy in the strangulation death of a 23-year-old woman, Marayna Rodgers. Comanche was with the team on a Vegas road trip in early December when the gruesome incident he was allegedly a part of occurred.
Comanche pleaded not guilty in March and is expected to stand trial next year for his involvement in Rodgers’ death.
In the aftermath of Comanche’s arrest, Harding wasn’t just responsible for coaching basketball, but for trying to find meaning in something that suddenly seemed so trivial.
First, the team had to load into buses for a 2½ hour ride to Santa Cruz that same day for a game against the Golden State Warriors’ G League affiliate the following night.
There was so little tangible information, it didn’t surprise Harding that Santa Cruz beat Stockton. Her team was in a fog, she said.
“I didn’t want to be in the hotel because everyone knows we’re Stockton,” Harding said. “They look at you.”
Harding did everything she could to try to revive her team’s shaken spirit. She organized a trip to an amusement park — to get away from the hotel teeming with curious G League colleagues. She coordinated with the NBA and the Kings’ franchise for crisis support for her players and staff. She appealed to the league to postpone Stockton’s games, to no avail.
The fact that her team even took the court was a coaching feat in itself. She wanted to set her remaining players up to have Harris come calling with good news the next time.
“Every NBA team, front office, staff member, GM, assistant GMs — they’re all there,” Harding said. “Of course, there was a lot of disappointment and anger and sadness, but then there was also opportunity, too. So you can’t let that take away from your opportunity.”
Harding and her team had unwittingly become characters in a true crime docuseries, playing out in real time.
“Everyone’s like, ‘You’re going to be on Netflix,'” Harding said. “It’s tough because I remember the trip. I remember the trip. I remember everything. I remember him getting on the bus that morning …
In Orlando, Stockton went 1-1, falling to 5-11 overall between the Tip-Off Tournament and Winter Showcase. From there, through the trauma, Harding guided the Kings to a 24-10 regular-season record and became the first woman named as the G League’s Coach of the Year.
“I don’t know if it all brought us closer together,” she said, “but honestly, I had to take the lead on all of that.”
Nearly two years later, she is an assistant coach on the Los Angeles Lakers — the first woman assistant in the franchise’s history — and she says her experience in Stockton prepared her for the challenges that inevitably come with the league’s most popular team.
“When people ask me, especially being a woman [in this field], ‘What is the hardest thing?’ Or, ‘How do you handle the adversity?’ I’m like, are you kidding? You kidding?” Harding said.
Her mission is to build an unassailable résumé that can help her break the gender barrier that her predecessors in the game — women such as Nancy Lieberman, Stephanie Ready, Becky Hammon, Jenny Boucek and Dawn Staley — have chipped away at through their success in the sport.
“She’s a professional, she knows the game, she is a great communicator, she brings a level of energy, positivity. She is just great,” Lakers acting governor Jeanie Buss told ESPN. “I’m just thrilled that she is part of our staff.
HARDING’S TIME AS a player at Duke University culminated in being named the women’s Naismith College Player of the Year and becoming the No. 1 pick in the 2007 WNBA draft.
But it started more simply — as one of five freshmen on the women’s team reporting for a summer session, at the same time as the five freshmen on the men’s team.
One of those men would also go on to be named the men’s Naismith College Player of the Year and become the No. 11 pick in the NBA draft in 2006.
“We literally moved onto campus in June of 2002, the very same day,” JJ Redick, now the head coach of the Lakers, told ESPN. “We were all in the same dorm building together. We did track workouts and agility workouts. There’s a bond that forms when you’re 18 years old. So she’s been a friend a long time.”
Their careers took them in different directions, with Harding playing nine seasons for six different teams in the WNBA, with international play interspersed in between, before retiring in 2017 after a final season in Turkey.
Through the program, she made a connection with current Chicago Bulls general manager Marc Eversley, who was an executive with the Philadelphia 76ers. He hired her as a pro-personnel scout — the first woman in that position in Sixers franchise history — and she eventually served in a player development role with the team.
“I saw him and it was very comforting to me because I had never coached before,” Harding said. “And to have a vet that just immediately gave the respect, the young ones saw it. It made the transition very easy. And lo and behold, he’s my boss now.”
In addition to his long-standing relationship with her, and the trust they’d formed, Harding had already made strong impressions on two other franchise stakeholders — Lakers president of basketball operations and GM, Rob Pelinka, and Buss.
Pelinka had met her years before at a middle school gym in Orange County when he was there to watch his daughter Emery’s team play. One of the other dads was Harding’s business manager, and Harding had come to see his daughter play.
“She didn’t need to show up to this ratty, old gym for an eighth grade girl’s basketball game,” Pelinka said. “So you’re struck with, this is just a really quality person.”
She puts together the scouting report for a third of L.A.’s games, splitting the task with assistants Beau Levesque and Ty Abbott, and presents the information to the team.
She is in charge of their scout teams — running plays in practice that an opponent runs. Like, for example, helping Dalton Knecht run plays as if he is Devin Booker before a game against the Phoenix Suns.
She coached the Lakers’ summer league team in Las Vegas. And she works closely with Gabe Vincent and Lakers rookie Adou Thiero.
Vincent said Harding is a welcome personality added to a staff with coaches such as Redick and Greg St. Jean, who only half jokingly refer to themselves as “basketball sickos.”
“We have some coaches who are very loud and very in your face, I don’t think that’s necessarily her,” Vincent told ESPN. “She’s more likely to pull someone to the side, have a conversation. Or, to just get you in a workout and say, ‘This is the situation that you were struggling with. This is what we want you to do. This is what JJ is really looking for.’
“She really just does a good job at trying to help her players. And I think she has her way of leading.”
LAST SEASON, BEFORE the Lakers found their stride, going 27-14 in the second half of the season, L.A. was struggling to create separation against a plucky opponent it was supposed to beat.
Harding doesn’t remember the exact team or the exact date, but she remembers a lesson she learned when the Lakers called timeout and LeBron James and the rest of the team came to the bench.
“We were just going back and forth. Offense, defense, offense, defense. Really weren’t scoring. And [James] turned around, he looked at me, he was like, ‘OK, so you want to be a head coach, right?'” Harding said. “And I was like, ‘I do.’ And he’s like, ‘Look in these situations, I like to slow it down, let me post somebody up.’ He just kind of offered his thoughts … And I kind of took that and I told him, ‘Noted.'”
It’s interactions like these, with all-time greats in James and Luka Doncic, that also has her in no rush to leave.
She has head coaching experience in the G League and for both the Mexico and South Sudan women’s national teams. She was pursued aggressively by the Sparks for their head coaching vacancy last year, sources told ESPN, and has mulled over other WNBA opportunities, wondering if WNBA head coaching experience would accelerate her path.
“I am in an amazing position right now,” she said. “Would I go to the W? I absolutely would. Every box checked, right? I want to be a head coach. I know I will be a head coach, and I don’t feel a rush at that because I’m still learning every single day.”
Staley, who has coached the South Carolina women’s team to three national championships and seven Final Fours, interviewed for the New York Knicks this summer before they hired Mike Brown.
“I’m an optimistic person,” she said. “In my experience being in this league, I have been heavily supported. I have been given opportunity, I have been given responsibility, equity in this. Are we saying that these men just won’t hire me because I’m a woman? I’m going to give them more credit than that because I haven’t been treated that way.